See ‘The Signal’ Director Dan Bush’s Beatles-Inspired Short Film

All the horror buffs we know are talking about The Signal, the indie sci-fi horror film told from three different perspectives, each created by a different director. (It came out last week, and it might make you crap your pants. Literally.) One of those directors, Dan Bush, is also responsible for 2006’s A Day in the Life, one of the coolest short films we’ve seen in recent years. Intercutting between a soldier’s harrowing day in the midst of WWII and a young office drone’s day in the sixties (yes, it was inspired by the Beatles song), Bush’s virtually dialogue-free cinematic poem meditates on fathers and sons, the despair of a life unfulfilled, and also the strange subliminal connections people make with one another. It also gets more surreal and haunting as it progresses; indeed, those who’ve seen The Signal may notice some similarities between this short and Bush’s final segment of that film. —Bilge Ebiri